“I am a lifelong USC Trojan fan, and I believe the BCS worked.”

There, I stated it publicly and it wasn’t even that hard to do!  Why don’t we all take a deep breath and say it together:  “The BCS worked.”  Now don’t you feel better, not being worked up into a popular frenzy and actually letting the words of sober truth roll off your tongue? 

Now maybe you will listen with an open mind to my case for the BCS. 

I grew up watching Pat Hayden, Charles White, and Marcus Allen. I was also probably one of a very few Trojan fans cheering on the Cardinal and Gold while attending this year’s Rose Bowl who truly believed that the BCS had done its job, and done it well.  How could I hold this “obviously” wrong opinion, an opinion shown to be “wrong” by the popular discontent of so many who don’t want to take an opinion different from their neighbor, or from their local sports-talk radio show? 

First, let’s gain some perspective on this extremely rare college football season.  This year there wasn’t a single undefeated, and therefore truly great, team; for great teams don’t lose games they should win.  This lack of an undefeated team after the regular season is extremely rare.  In nearly 70 years, since the AP poll was introduced in 1936, there has NEVER been a year without an undefeated team left standing after the regular season—until this year.  That’s right:  dating back to the days when Army ruled college football, there has always been at least one team without a loss going into the bowls.  Granted, conference championship games have significantly increased the likelihood that no team will emerge unbeaten, but this history is still extremely compelling.  It seems rather unreasonable to call for serious reform of a system based on results from a season that was roughly as rare as Halley’s Comet. 

Second, the BCS actually worked well considering the nature and rarity of the occasion.  The BCS provided some order in a season that certainly could have been more chaotic.  In pre-BCS years, USC would have gone to the Rose Bowl, LSU to the Sugar, and Oklahoma to the Orange, and we would have seen none of these teams play each other.  This is essentially what happened in 1967, probably the closest season to this one in terms of the dynamic.  That season, 6th-ranked Wyoming was undefeated, but the national championship came down to three 1-loss teams—two of which, interestingly, were USC and Oklahoma.  And, sure enough, all three of these teams played in different bowl games.  Let’s not pretend that we would have seen the “dream” match-up of LSU-USC in prior years, nor that we would be guaranteed of seeing it in a playoff.  The BCS at least ensured that we got to see two of the top three teams square off in a very exciting game.

Ultimately we had three teams that all had very good seasons but which lost to teams they shouldn’t have.  The computers objectively placed the teams with the toughest schedules, who lost to the best opponents, in the title game.  While the sportswriters and coaches subjectively thought the team with the easiest schedule, which lost to the worst team, should be in the title game.  They did this, presumably, by comparing the three teams’ style of play and their manner of winning or losing.  There is a place for both objective and subjective judgments here, and it seems expected—or even unavoidable— that there would be controversy in such a year.  But the BCS effectively balanced subjective and objective criteria and provided a match-up of two of the top three teams. 

Third, let’s face it that the BCS did what it was designed to do.  It was not designed to provide an indisputable national championship game when faced with three relatively worthy, but no particularly worthy, teams.  No system that culminates in just one postseason game could possibly eliminate controversy in such a season.  To be fair-minded, we must soberly reflect on what the BCS has done.  The BCS has eliminated several perennial problems in college football:

1.  The Hurricane-Huskies problem:  No longer would two exciting, undefeated teams not be allowed to play each other in a title game, like Washington and Miami in 1991, Nebraska and Penn St. in 1995, Florida St. and Arizona St. in 1996, and Michigan and Nebraska in 1997.  Those games could potentially have provided as much magic as the great Ohio St.-Miami game from 2002; and, under the BCS, they would have been played. 

2.  The BYU problem:  No longer can a team like BYU, from a weak conference and with a weak schedule, struggle to beat a 6-5 Michigan team in the Holiday Bowl and still lay claim to the national title.  Under the BCS, BYU would have had a chance to beat Washington or Oklahoma in a true test of BYU’s abilities.  This would have benefited both BYU (if the Cougars had prevailed) and college football.

3.  The #1 vs. #2 problem:  Even in years when there has been only one undefeated team instead of two, the BCS would often have pitted that team against a strong, worthy opponent.  In fact, this is what the BCS has repeatedly done:  several times, the nation’s only major undefeated team—which has in each case has also been the #1-ranked team in the BCS—has played an outstanding opponent in the BCS title game and has prevailed as the national champion.  Wouldn’t it have been nice to see Colorado play Georgia Tech in 1990?

The BCS was designed to fix these problems in college football, and it has—as was demonstrated by the 2002 Fiesta Bowl, one of the most exciting games in all of college football history.  Now one year removed from that great Ohio St.-Miami game, people want serious reform of a system that has solved college football’s most common problems, because they are reacting to a problem that has only first appeared after 70 years of recorded poll history.  This doesn’t sound reasonable. 

In the end, we must appreciate what college football, now aided by the BCS, does better than any of the other pro and college sports:  it provides a tremendously meaningful regular season, where almost every week there is a game with possible national title implications.  This does not happen as fully in any other sport, and it adds to the drama and intensity of college football.  Now, under the BCS, with its built-in incentives for teams to play other good teams, non-conference games have become better and better over the last six years.  When you strip away all the rhetoric, the truth is that the BCS simply rewards teams that play tough schedules and win.

Put another way, college football is better than any other sport at separating the wheat from the chaff.  That is to say, through its great regular season, it separates the best teams from the rest and assures that they will face each other in a meaningful game.  The solution to a year with three “best” teams, or an excess of wheat if you will (albeit no truly outstanding wheat), is not to throw in more chaff and hope for the best.  Playoffs do not ensure a great final-game match-up; they only ensure that lesser teams get a second chance to play Cinderella.  And often Cinderella, unlike in the fairy tale, just isn’t quite ready to hold her own at the ball.  Remember there is a reason the Super Bowl game is often a boring blow out.

Is anyone seriously arguing that Michigan, Ohio St., Miami, and the like, were deserving of a place in the title game this year?  No.  Then why argue for a system that would put them back “in play” when they have justly been eliminated from the title hunt by their regular season performance?  A playoff would only cheapen the regular season tremendously and would likely not have provided what people were clamoring for this season:  an LSU-USC game.  And, contrary to much popular perception, removing the computers from the BCS equation would not have produced an LSU-USC game.  It would have produced an Oklahoma-USC game.

The BCS has been great for college football:  It has moderated the subjective, and often regionally biased, opinions of sportswriters and coaches with objective computer rankings—and, in turn, the polls also balance the computers.  It has essentially eliminated the possibility of an undefeated team not playing another undefeated, or top-flight, team in its final game.  It has ensured a final game pairing arguably the top two teams in the country.  It was not designed primarily to handle three one-loss teams with very little distinction among them.  Radically redesigning the BCS to “fix” a small, rare problem while sacrificing its ability to address the larger, more common problems just simply doesn’t make much sense.

If one did want to provide a solution to handling this three-1-loss-team scenario, one could simply add a clause to the BCS contract providing for a single extra game in years where the BCS #1 is different from the AP#1.  This would address to this scenario without seriously subverting the best elements of the BCS or the bowls, and while avoiding the fools’ gold of a playoff system.

There is a common legal maxim that states, “tough cases make bad law.”  People should step back and realize that this year was a tough case; and they should think twice about making hasty reactive changes and, perhaps, bad law.